my friends, I was gone. It was all finished.-The ideas blooming in me were different, and they reallydidn't belong in Avenel. The Civil War, as I've put it here, opened for instantaneously to the spirit, the doorway Ineeded. I went right through it. Those strange, doe-eyedold America farm boy creatures, dragged through trees and meadows, oddly spacey-looking, clutching a rifle or a long-gun, wearing oddly-fitting balloon field clothes, a somewhat jaunty cap perched crookedly atop their heads - they all seemedto be madly marching slowly towards death. There was justa nothing that could be done about it. I'd view the towns andthe lands - fiery, burning, torched and parched, and I'dthink about all those lives affected by the venomous fury oftheir vague and unknown ideologies. Convinced. I wasconvinced, that no one knew a damned thing about what theywere doing, or why. The sainted 'Cause' of all this carnage wasjust a speech-maker's ploy to rile people up. America'sturmoil, back then, was - like mine - purely internal. Allthings were amassing and bumping-around, layers of newarrivals, immigrants of Irish and German and Scotsmen,plus the piles of black people, North and South, de-valued,being used. The new land itself was screaming out in terror.By the millions, piles of Indian bodies and buffalo bodies werestrewn about over the plains and prairies and forest - the'Amerycin' juggernaut had hit the ground running and wasnow way up to speed, and it consumed everything in its path.I read it all, like a between-the-lines, coded message. All thosepeople in Avenel and Woodbridge, schools and churches, and all the rigorous, conglomerated bullshit they were trying to livewas being foisted off on me - a complacency and a sense thatall things were right, if you'd just settle in, buy, build, consume, and keep smiling while everything around you fell and was carted away. That was, quite simply, NOT to be for me, and theycould all go to Hell. It's still like that today - look at anydisgusting highway corridor; and people still clamor for more.-Before I close this one out, I have one more thing tomention - it baffled me, unsettled me greatly, when it happened, and I only look back on it now, some 50 yearslater, to make mention. I'm not using names here, or if Ido they're not real - it's unnecessary to single them out, andanyway death has intervened. When
I was about 11, my friend and his
sister had a really nice girl over for the day - a friend or something of
the sister. I remember her well, I was caught up, and she was enchanting to me, don't know why, and we were very young, perhaps 10 or 11. We were just hanging around, playing some stupid card game they
had called Mille Bournes or something (I think it means 'a thousand miles'), a
French game with cards and a board or something, about traveling, breakdowns and accumulated mileage. Beats me. Passing the time of day. We'd all gone outside to
the rear of the property. They had a fence with a gate marking the end of their
yard. I don't know exactly what happened, but the next thing I knew my friend had this
girl outside the fence, on the other side, and he was yelling intensely right into her
face while she was completely collapsed, crying loudly, tears streaming. I was
in a momentary confused panic, concerned. I'll never know what triggered that
moment or how or why, but he had driven her from the yard to the outside of the
fence and was screaming at her all sorts and every sort of 'you're a fucking no
good Jew' accusations, calling out her religion, her race, her name, her family, her past and
future and present too. She was hurt, shattered and destroyed. I'll never forget
that. I'd never before faced off that sort of thing, and had no idea, at that
moment, from where he could have gotten all this information and how this could
have been started. Years later, in watching, I realized his father was a stern
Germanic sort, as was his mother, a Lithuanian or Russian or something, and that
this all probably came through their home-life and upbringing. But I didn't know
that at the time. Yes, this girl's facial features, posture and bearing were
very obviously 'Jewish' as we think of it, and lovely to boot, but it never, until that moment,
mattered to me. After that time, I was stuck and branded by some form of that
awareness. Right then, I really could have cried in shock and sorrow with her.
Pretty amazing stuff. It was a brutal scene, as much as anything I'd ever see in
my future German Lit. classes at Elmira College, of Nazi actions, ghetto
cleansings, and the rest.-Lots
of things make me sad, still. Lots of things still have me stunned. Still. There
are things I can't get over, things which linger in my memory, things from which
I make other things, build upon them, run with - but the essential kernel of
Reality I went through is always there. I'm not special; in any way. And I
really think that the sorts of things I live by are available to everyone - Life
is a treasure, amassing nuggets of gold, But no one bothers to, or knows how to,
pan for it. Can't be bothered. Too much trouble. Well then, walk on. Live your
own miserable shit, and I'll work through mine. When we're all done, we're both
dead.

About Me

You can surmise all that I am from what it is you read about me herein - experiences and outlooks philosophies and viewpoints too. "For God's sake ! will SOMEONE please read this stuff - it's very important."